Palo Alto Weekly

Robots fly, swim and mow lawns at 'block party'

They ranged from funky robot pirates to sleek, sophisticated surgical devices and a robotic guide for the blind that could replace guide dogs. The Silicon Valley Robot Block Party on Wednesday afternoon featured more than 40 robots of every level of simplicity and complexity at Palo Alto law firm WilmerHale.

WilmerHale and Silicon Valley Robotics, an association that supports innovative robotic technologies, sponsored the April 9 event. The robot party is in its fifth year and attracted people of all ages, from school kids to investors.

The robot party gave inventors a chance to show off technologies for consumers, heavy industry, technology and medicine. On display were a driverless car, programmable lawnmower and gear to travel the surface of Mars.

In the consumer arena, Steve Castellotti demonstrated Puzzle Box's Orbit, a small helicopter that users can learn to operate through mind control. Users can boost their powers of concentration by focusing on images on their mobile device. Wearing a headset that communicates by Bluetooth, certain brain waves communicate with the helicopter, which can hover, spin and fly based on programmed instructions.

"With the brain-controlled helicopter, you can practice skills of concentration and mental relaxation," Castellotti said. Users can also steer the helicopter with a tablet computer.

Other consumer-oriented robots included the nifty Egg-Bot kit, which creates elaborate Faberge-style designs on eggs with a fine pen or wax stylus. The egg designs can be dyed multiple colors and create precise, intricate images and even writing as fine as the dot from an ink-jet printer.

Another robot, a programmable Bosch lawnmower, roamed the lawn Wednesday while a space rover from NASA easily climbed up steps and raced around the grass.

NASA Ames' Intelligent Robotics Group, which includes graduate engineering students from a variety of universities, showed off its latest prototypes for wheel-less land rover models. The flexible ball-like structures are collapsible and can carry a load of instruments in their center. Dropped from space to the surface of Mars, for example, the balls are capable of bouncing and rolling over the planet's tough terrain. Unlike wheeled vehicles, they won't snag and can reach previously inaccessible areas, Drew Sabelhaus said.

"It's cheaper to manufacture and it is its own airbag," Aliakbar Toghyan, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student, said.

Sabelhaus demonstrated a caterpillar-like structure that is based on the human spine. It is remarkably flexible and also has tensile strength, enabling it to wriggle and bend over rocks, he said.

Industrial robots included a SRI-invented vertical climber that is used for bridge inspections. The device, which looks like a thin solar sheet on runners, can climb up overpasses to find flaws and damage by transmitting video images.

"It uses electrostatic adhesion," SRI's Alexander Huff said. It's the same principle as rubbing a balloon on your head and sticking it to a wall."

Alice Wu, a PhD candidate at Stanford University's Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory, develops sensors that can be put on robot skins to sense pressure when visual inspection is not possible.

"It can sense to grab things with a certain amount of force," she said. The devices are being developed for use in Norway to do robotic oil drilling to detect if heavy pipes are slipping out of grippers.

"They use acoustic emissions sensors to detect slip," she explained.

This year's event was the first to be held off the Stanford campus. The university's Volkswagen Automation Innovation Lab hosted the previous four block parties. But the change of venue marks a step forward for robotics, Glenn Luinenburg, corporate partner at WilmerHale, said.

"It represents a real fundamental shift away from the research labs. Robots are moving out of the lab into commercialization," he said.

The law firm represents many early-stage start ups and emerging-stage companies in high tech. Though many of the firm's clients do work in artificial intelligence, no specific area of robotics is emerging at this point, he said.

"We're at the very early stage in the growth of robotics and artificial intelligence in the valley. There's tremendous opportunity for growth," he said.

The block party is one of the premier events of the fifth annual National Robotics Week, which runs from April 5 to 13. The week-long commemoration celebrates American robotics innovation and educates the public about the field as well as careers in robotics, science, technology, engineering and math.

points to a short paper containing a goodly number of links to Youtube videos that provide details about the use of robotics in hospitals--which are exceedingly expensive places to operate.

The cost of health care has been sky-rocketing, based on the never-ending demand for higher salaries of unionized health care workers. The introduction of robotics into the hospital environment offers to hold the line on some salaries. However, the whole hospital environment will need to be redesigned so that the Information System will include access to all patient real-time data, so that errors in treatment can be reduced, or at least identified, even if only after-the-fact.

The salary data for the hospital staff in the Sunnyvale hospital, published yesterday in the POST, was pretty scary. There wasn't one person in the article making less than $100K.

It is well past time for every public agency to begin working on technology plans that will see the reduction in the number of personnel by upwards of 30%--with the work these people performed redesigned so that it can be performed via IT (Information Technology) and robotics.

Posted by Meds,
a resident of Downtown North
on Apr 10, 2014 at 1:59 pm

Wayne Martin: Care to provide material that proves your [portion removed] statement that: "The cost of health care has been sky-rocketing, based on the never-ending demand for higher salaries of unionized health care workers."? I think you'll find that much of the increase involves ever more costly pieces of equipment, IT implementation and fixes, and more expensive drugs.

Also, I don't think you'd want to be in a hospital where IT and robots replaced 30 percent of the employees.

Don't miss out on the discussion!Sign up to be notified of new comments on this topic.

Email:

Post a comment

Posting an item on Town Square is simple and requires no registration. Just complete this form and hit "submit" and your topic will appear online.
Please be respectful and truthful in your postings so Town Square will continue to be a thoughtful gathering place for sharing community information
and opinion. All postings are subject to our TERMS OF USE, and may be deleted if deemed inappropriate by our staff.

We prefer that you use your real name, but you may use any "member" name you wish.